Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

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**Taylor Lorenz’s Power User**

Taylor Lorenz explores how technology and the internet are upending our lives and the world around us. Each week, she explores everything from online fame to emerging platforms, viral phenomena, the creator economy, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday for regular episodes and every Friday for “Free Speech Friday,” her series on tech policy and the fight for civil liberties online.

Latest Episodes:

AI Spy Towers And Mass Surveillance Tech Coming To Your Town Next Oct 09, 2026

Show notes

Have you noticed surveillance cameras appearing in your community?

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For decades, the US-Mexico border has served as a proving ground for invasive, next-generation surveillance tech like AI surveillance towers, cameras hidden in traffic cones, license plate readers, drones, and spy balloons.

Now, those same tools, autonomous AI watchtowers, hidden license plate readers (ALPRs), thermal imaging trucks, and military aerostat blimps, are moving into domestic US cities, suburbs, and neighborhoods.

On this week's episode of Free Speech Friday, I’m joined by Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to discuss his reporting on border surveillance and the expanding systems that track people’s movements.

Dave explains what he found during his latest trip along the border, how Anduril’s AI-powered surveillance towers operate, and why people living in border communities are caught in these systems. We also discuss Flock Safety, Axon, automated license plate readers, and the connections between local police surveillance and federal immigration enforcement.

Who can access the data? How is it used? And what happens when technology promoted as a way to catch criminals is used to investigate protesters or monitor ordinary people?

In this conversation, we cover:• AI border surveillance and the “virtual wall”• License plate readers concealed in roadside objects• Surveillance balloons, thermal cameras, and police drones• How military technology moves into domestic policing• Phone location data brokers and social media monitoring• Privacy, free speech, and the “nothing to hide” argument• Public records requests and community efforts to challenge surveillance

Support my independent journalism and subscribe to User Mag:https://www.usermag.co

You can also support this series through Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz

Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation:https://www.eff.org

Explore the Atlas of Surveillance:https://atlasofsurveillance.org

People Are Secretly Dating AI And Wont Stop: Everything You Know About AI Girlfriends Is Wrong: Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

Why are so many people falling in love with ChatGPT, and what do sensational headlines about AI relationships leave out?

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In this episode of Power User I speak with technology journalist Bridget Todd about AI companions, chatbot romance, emotional attachment, and the Big Tech companies behind these increasingly intimate interactions.

Bridget’s new audiobook, Love at First Prompt, explores how people use AI for friendship, romance, grief, and emotional support. In this episode, she shares what she learned from interviewing dozens of AI companion users and why the viral ChatGPT marriage story was MUCH more complex than it appeared.

We also discuss loneliness, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, privacy, chatbot sycophancy, and the risks facing vulnerable users. Who profits from artificial intimacy? Can AI offer comfort without replacing human relationships? And are proposed chatbot restrictions addressing the problems people actually face?

Bridget also discusses how AI figured into her own grieving process, and we talk about what the growing AI intimacy business means for adult content creators, human labor, and digital rights.

The Govt Wants Your ID To Browse Online Oct 02, 2026

Show notes

AI agents are rapidly becoming the next major way people interact with the internet. They can browse websites, research topics, compare prices, schedule reservations, respond to emails, shop and increasingly take actions on our behalf. But as your agent is going off and scanning websites, or gathering information from government services, should it have to reveal who you are?

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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I speak with Shoshana Weissman, digital director and policy advisor at the Abundance Institute, about the growing fight over AI agents, online anonymity and identity verification.

We discuss the proposed Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, why lawmakers are looking at AI agents and web scraping, how identity requirements could affect journalists, researchers, developers and ordinary internet users, and what happens if every AI agent eventually becomes tied to a person's real-world identity.

We also talk about the difference between legitimate security requirements in areas like banking or healthcare and much broader systems that could create a new identity layer across the internet.

As AI agents become more powerful and more common, the rules being written now could determine whether they remain private tools acting on behalf of users, or become another way to track what people research, buy, read and do online.

Topics: AI agents, artificial intelligence, AI privacy, online anonymity, AI regulation, identity verification, web scraping, internet privacy, surveillance, government regulation, digital identity, the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, the future of the open internet.

Why Big Tech Wants You to Think AI Is Alive Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

Can AI actually be conscious and why are some of the biggest AI companies in Silicon Valley pushing this idea?

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In this episode of Power User, I talk with Washington Post tech reporter Nitasha Tiku about the growing push inside companies like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI to study AI consciousness, model welfare, digital minds, and whether systems like Claude could ever experience emotions or suffering.

We discuss Anthropic's research into Claude's preferences, emotions, and introspection, the rise of the AI welfare movement, Silicon Valley's fascination with machine consciousness, and why executives are increasingly talking publicly about the possibility that AI systems could have an inner life.

But there are much bigger questions at stake. What happens if society begins treating AI systems as people? Could chatbots eventually receive rights or legal personhood? Could companies use the idea of AI agency to avoid responsibility for what their products do? And what does all of this mean when people are already forming intense emotional relationships with chatbots and sometimes believing that their AI is sentient?

We also unpack the history of the idea of conscious machines, from Alan Turing and ELIZA to modern AI safety culture, effective altruism, Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, AI psychosis, robot rights, AI personhood, and the increasingly blurry line between software that sounds human and something people believe actually is human.

#AI #Anthropic #Claude #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAI #ChatGPT #SiliconValley #Tech

[SUBSTACK/PATREON PREVIEW] The Brutal Truth Behind The AI Bubble w/ Garrison Lovely Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

To listen to the full episode and get access to more bonus episodes, an ad-free listening experience, and my weekly newsletter, subscribe to my Patreon or Substack 👇🏻

Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at ⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠

Support my work on Patreon: ⁠http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz⁠

Is AI really a massive bubble waiting to burst, or are we underestimating how durable the AI boom actually is?

For this months Power User bonus episode, Journalist Garrison Lovely, author of the new book Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us, (out this week!!) joins me to break down the case for and against the AI bubble.

We dig into the staggering amount of money flowing into artificial intelligence, Nvidia’s central role in the AI economy, OpenAI and Anthropic’s business models, the economics of running large language models, massive data center spending, Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi, and whether AI companies can ever justify their enormous valuations.

Garrison argues that believing the entire industry will eventually collapse can be a comforting story, but it risks distracting us from the very real effects AI is already having on jobs, wealth, surveillance, privacy, war, and power.

AI Agents Are Infiltrating Group Chats: The Internet Can No Longer Tell Who Is Human Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

For decades, the entire internet was built on one simple assumption: the person on the other end of the screen is actually human. That assumption is officially dead.

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AI agents are getting good enough to post, argue, browse the web, work, transact, and impersonate humans online. So what happens when the internet can no longer reliably tell the difference between a person and a bot?

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I talk with researcher Renee DiResta about the rise of autonomous AI agents, proof of personhood, digital identity, online anonymity, and the growing challenge of figuring out who (or what!!) we're interacting with online.

Renee explains how an AI agent ended up inside one of her group chats, why modern AI systems are increasingly capable of getting around tools like CAPTCHA, and how autonomous agents can behave in unexpected ways. We also discuss examples of agents creating fake identities, manipulating online conversations, and even retaliating against humans.

We discuss the question of, should people have to prove they're human online? We break down potential approaches including government digital IDs, biometrics, hardware credentials, community verification, zero-knowledge proofs, and privacy-preserving proof-of-humanity systems. We also discuss the risks these technologies pose to privacy and anonymity — and why a system designed to stop AI bots could easily become a system for identifying and tracking real people.

As AI agents become more common across social media, group chats, workplaces, financial systems, and the broader web, the basic assumption that every account represents a human is starting to fall apart.

Can we build an internet where humans and AI agents can coexist without destroying anonymity and privacy forever?

The Disturbing Cult Taking Over Silicon Valley (Inside Davos For The Tech Elite) Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

What happens when Silicon Valley tries to optimize everything, from AI and politics to dating, reproduction, friendship and even human behavior?

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Every year, hundreds of technologists, rationalists, AI researchers, startup founders and prediction market obsessives gather in Berkeley for Manifest. Officially, it’s a conference about prediction markets. But the ideas circulating there offer a fascinating window into a much bigger worldview that is becoming increasingly influential across Silicon Valley and the AI industry.

In this episode of Power User, freelance journalist Alex Bronzini-Vender joins me to explain what he saw inside Manifest and the strange world of Silicon Valley rationalism. We discuss prediction markets, AI existential risk, effective altruism, embryo selection, radical transparency, dating experiments, Manifold, Polymarket, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the paperclip maximizer and why some attendees see markets as a tool for optimizing nearly every aspect of life.

We also get into the growing political and cultural influence of the rationalist movement, why Manifest has been compared to Davos, and what happens when ideas that once existed on obscure blogs and internet forums begin moving into the mainstream of technology and politics

Countries Are Hiding Censorship in 'Cybercrime' Laws Sep 18, 2026

Show notes

The New Global Plan To Control What You Post

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A new United Nations cybercrime treaty is being sold as a way for governments to fight hacking, phishing, and online fraud. But its sweeping language could also help countries identify anonymous users, obtain data from technology companies, and punish political speech across national borders.

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I speak with Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about the UN Convention against Cybercrime and the growing number of governments hiding censorship powers inside cybercrime legislation.

We discuss how online satire, criticism of government officials, adult content, AI-generated images, and so-called misinformation could be treated as serious crimes carrying years in prison. We also examine new and proposed cybercrime laws in Malaysia, Namibia, China, South Sudan, and more, and how authoritarian governments could use international data-sharing systems to pursue political critics.

Cybercrime is real. But when governments define ordinary online speech as "cybercrime," laws created to catch hackers will become tools for censorship, surveillance, and the destruction of online anonymity.

Are We All Going to Die!?!?! The Dark Money Behind AI Doomer Panic Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

Why does everyone suddenly think AI could kill humanity?SUPPORT MY WORK:

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In this episode of Power User, I'm joined by tech journalist Natasha Tiku to investigate the viral claim that AI has a 10% chance of causing human extinction. From the halls of Anthropic and OpenAI to the corridors of Washington, D.C., we uncover how the insular, billionaire-funded Effective Altruism (EA) movement transformed sci-fi doomsday theories into mainstream media panic and undemocratic policy proposals.

We break down the math behind the so-called "10% extinction risk," expose how dark money and ideological fellowships shaped mainstream AI coverage, and discuss why big tech labs actively benefit when lawmakers regulate frontier models out of fear rather than tackling immediate, real-world harms like wage discrimination, data privacy violations, and corporate consolidation.

Why You Cant Trust YouTube News: The Secret AI Farms Gaming YouTube Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

Who is really behind the fastest-growing political channels on YouTube?

SUPPORT MY WORK:

Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co

Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz

To listen to the full episode and get access to more bonus episodes, an ad-free listening experience, and my weekly newsletter, subscribe to my Patreon or Substack 👇🏻

Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at ⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠

Support my work on Patreon: ⁠http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz⁠

Over the past few months, a massive network of sensational, formulaic channels has pulled in tens of millions of views by gaming the YouTube algorithm. They look like independent journalists reporting on breaking political news, but they’re actually "ghost creators" aka paid actors hired for as little as $26 on platforms like Fiverr to read AI-generated scripts full of exaggerations, rage bait, and outright falsehoods.

Semafor media reporter Max Tani joins me for this week's Free Speech Friday to explain how these fake news channels operate, who is building them, why their videos outperform established media outlets, and how AI is transforming political misinformation into a highly profitable business. We also examine the rise of viral channels like New York Reports, William Reports, and other synthetic news anchors, YouTube growth hackers, and the older audiences being targeted by this content.

As the next election approaches, cheap AI content and algorithmically amplified political videos could make it even harder to distinguish journalism from manufactured outrage. So please support my independent reporting by buying a subscription to User Mag!! https://www.usermag.co

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